West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee announced the facility at the foundation stone-laying ceremony of the upcoming Bengal Silicon Valley tech hub.

Price war

Kolkata, India– Getty Images

“The data center project is a reaffirmation of Reliance’s faith in Bengal, and it will be our contribution towards state chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s goal of digitizing West Bengal,” Jio’s eastern India head Tarun Jhunjhunwala said at the ceremony, The Economic Times of India reports.

The publication adds that people familiar with the matter assert that the company has put in an application to the state government for 40 acres of land on a long-term lease basis for the facility.

The mobile network operator became a part of Reliance Industries Limited in 2010, when Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani acquired Infotel Broadband Services for 4,800 crore ($700 million) and renamed it Reliance Jio Infocomm.

Now Asia’s richest person, Ambani has aggressively pushed Jio Infocomm to grow, causing a mobile data price war across India. With 215 million subscribers out of the country’s 1.13 billion mobile users, there is still room for expansion, something the telecom unit is expected to pursue for some time.

Reliance “will strive to double subscribers to 400 million before raising prices,” Kunal Agrawal, a Hong Kong-based analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence said last month.

“We expect cut-throat pricing and weak average revenue per user to continue over the next one-to-two years, possibly increasing balance sheet leverage for other domestic telecom incumbents.”